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Massivity: Have We Simply Outgrown the MMORPG?

Developers might be chasing a model that no longer works in today's world.

When asked how we know one another, a close friend and I like to tell other people that we met in 2004 while killing a pig -- only after the inevitable outrage do we clarify that the pig was a quest objective in World of Warcraft's Elwynn Forest in 2004. On another occasion, a chance encounter brought me face-to-face with something of a nemesis: the leader of a rival guild. As it turned out, we actually had much in common, and our real-life friendship has now grown to the point that I often have trouble remembering his in-game name. I have about a dozen other stories like that, but I recently realized I haven't formed similar relationships in MMORPGs in years. And now, reflecting on the last decade, I think that's less because I've changed and more because readily available information and fewer reasons to rely on our friends have robbed the genre of that dash of magic -- a magic that may never return.

Risen's first sight of Ragnaros in WoW, March 2005. At the time, this was a really big deal.

That's not to say that I don't spend much of my time looking for that same pull that sucked away my social life years ago, when I arguably endangered my performance in graduate school with all the time I spent in MMOPRGs. This very column started out as a reflection on the eight things that every good MMORPG must have for success. I agonized over the topic (and for much longer than I know my editor preferred), but I found too many holes in everything I thought of. An open, explorable world? TERA, Lord of the Rings Online, and even Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising have that in some form or another. A fulfilling story? Star Wars: The Old Republic had that in spades, but six months later the limited appeal of adding engrossing storylines on the standard MMORPG experience seems all too apparent. The pieces, it seems, are usually in place; developers just exhibit varying degrees of competence when getting them to work together. But even when they do a decent job, as in Rift, the MMO itself rarely succeeds in snaring new souls like they used to.

You Can't Go Home Again

The modern gaming world lacks the precise conditions that famously made us slaves to the WoW/EverQuest model.

At this point, I'm convinced this lack of fulfillment springs from generational differences rather than the design of the games themselves. I'm not saying that younger players can't enjoy or even love MMORPGs, but I do believe the modern gaming world lacks the precise conditions that famously made us slaves to the WoW/EverQuest model in the last decade. It's sometimes hard to believe how different the world was just 10 years ago. The MMORPG as a challenging yet social genre was at its peak when the internet was still slouching its way towards modernity (which I'm sure we'll say about the internet today a decade from now), and the scarcity of readily reliable information or methods of contact outside of games allowed MMO communities to achieve some semblance of a real world. By and large, if we wanted to know something about a talent build or where to find a certain item or objective, we had to ask other players about them.

In other words, we usually didn't know what the hell we were doing. And that was a good thing.

That pinch of idealism flies out the window once you join a group and some smartass tells you "how it's done."

At best, we had forums, e-mails, or pathetic attempts at wikis that often didn't have the information we needed. Since this was a world before YouTube and widespread high-speed internet, you needed a damned good reason for downloading a video for a boss fight. "But Leif," you say, "if you think those resources ruin your experience, don't use them!" That might work if you're leveling alone (aside from the clearly marked quest objectives in most contemporary MMORPGs that discourage player interaction), but in my experience, that pinch of idealism flies out the window once you join a group and some smartass tells you "how it's done." Guilds exist that still rely on their own strategies, to be fair, but they're a rare and quirky breed.

I've Got Your Back

It wasn't always thus. I'd played through EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, Ultima Online, and almost all the "greatest hits" from those first years, but, like so many other 20-somethings in the last decade, it was World of Warcraft that really hooked me for three or so years. It's "cool" to hate on it now, but I think any MMORPG fan who played it back then has to acknowledge that its first years hit that sweet spot we were all looking for. For me, "hooked" was a bit of an understatement. Almost from the beginning, I was one of the principal mages in Risen, a guild that nabbed game-wide attention when we became the first American guild to down Kel'Thuzad in September of 2006. Other highlights included the world's first successful execution of Heigan's dance that July, high rankings on most bosses beginning with Nefarian, and a beloved level 1 gnome raid on Hogger that spawned several imitators. I loved every minute of it, and I won't deny that I felt a small pang of regret when I jumped ship and (temporarily) uninstalled WoW in 2006. As a guild, we simply "clicked," and we knew each other better than many real-life contacts. I've never felt as fulfilled as a team in real life as I did while formulating strategies with those 39 proud nerds more than six years ago. Social experiences like that, I believe, were what made WoW so successful.

They were our ideas, not cobbled together from videos or honed through partly guided runs on test servers.

To be sure, some of our strategies seem stupid in retrospect, but that was the beauty of them. They were our ideas, not cobbled together from videos or honed through partly guided runs on test servers weeks ahead of the official release, and we guarded them closely in an age when competing for server firsts still meant something. Instead of perfectly executing some known strategy, we had to think. Disastrous-but-fun antics, such as attempting to use a Hunter to down the then-undefeated Ragnaros (the first major raid boss in World of Warcraft), largely made up for any concerns we might have had about dull "kill and fetch" quests, mindless dailies, or a lack of an epic story while leveling.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The challenges of the group content ensured that we forged our own stories -- stories more memorable than the predictable fantasy drivel that makes its way into almost every game -- and that fact alone highlights how strong a prevailing sense of community and working together was in those days. For me it sprang from PvE raiding; for you, it might have been PvP. Regardless of how you approached it, there existed a sustained sense of depending on other players whom you knew well and contributing original ideas to strategies. I no longer find this feeling in today's MMORPGs, and I have serious doubts that the current model can survive in its absence.

Rift Chronicles: Heck, these days you don't need other players for instances.

Many contemporary MMORPGs fail or stumble precisely because they try to recapture this world in a gaming environment that no longer supports it. The word of the day is "accessibility" not "cooperation," and that shift threatens the overused EverQuest/World of Warcraft template no matter how well the combat works or how "dynamic" the world is. Turning back the clock is a pretty dream, but it'd never work today. Wikis, related guides, and especially "accessible" raiding modes like WoW's raid finder have removed most of the real mystery of exploration and mastering encounters, so a traditional endgame raiding structure can never hold the wide appeal it once did. The very combat model springs from the demands of primitive connectivity. Since high-speed internet is essentially the norm in 2012, there's little reason to maintain the comparatively unfulfilling tab-targeting combat over more action-based interactions like those in TERA and Vindictus.

A Piece of the Pie

Star Wars: The Old Republic in particular tried to recapture the spirit of the early 2000s by leaving out group finders.

It's not hard to understand why the thought of recapturing that addictive landscape must seem so appealing to developers, but that's like trying to release a contemporary game modeled entirely on Dragon's Lair because a bunch of folks played that arcade hit into the ground back in 1983. Yet we see it all the time. Rift modeled almost its entire structure on World of Warcraft apart from the extensive talent trees and the eponymous rifts, but one year later it's down to 16 servers from a high of around 99. Star Wars: The Old Republic in particular tried to recapture the spirit of the early 2000s by leaving out group finders and including long Flashpoints that occasionally took over an hour to finish, but now Tatooine must look more densely populated than most servers. Even the upcoming The Elder Scrolls Online strikes me as every bit as disappointing as I feared it would be.

TESO: "Hey! I think I see the ruins of Kunark over there!"

Slapping a free-to-play payment plan on existing models only masks the deficiencies of the aging gameplay and lackluster player interaction.

To remain relevant, MMORPGs need to become something else entirely. Slapping a free-to-play payment plan on existing models only masks the deficiencies of the aging gameplay and lackluster player interaction, and even when communities are fairly strong, many players seem content to play MMORPGs like single-player games. I personally don't see the point. Attempts to cram a single-player experience into an MMORPG (a la SWTOR and TESO) now seem misguided at best, since they reveal the genre's weaknesses once you deprioritize the social elements. MMORPGs should be about meeting, interacting, and achieving challenging goals with other players; anything else is secondary. To recapture something of that spirit of cooperation, what once passed for endgame gameplay needs to be integrated into the actual leveling experience somehow. The whole world needs to remain alive; zones that we passed through at level 10 should feel as satisfying at level 60. It can be accessible, but we need reasons to care about our fellow players.

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

In other words, the best hope lies in games that we would have sneered at for being too casual 10 years ago -- games that allow us to drop in and drop out as we please rather than taking up residence in them. We've already seen hints of that switch in upcoming games. Guild Wars 2 is one such game, and even though I'm still not convinced that the combat is as great or innovative as ArenaNet says, or that the quest structure does much more than removing the actual act of speaking to the questgiver, I can tell it's the kind of game I wouldn't mind logging into for a couple of hours every day. Its attempts to remove the player class "trinity" mark a massive step in the right direction as well. The Secret World also has the right idea with its lack of levels, classes, and traditional gear, although I worry it swings too far in the other direction and runs the risk of losing any sense of reward for achieving goals. With the demands of my post-20-something schedule, I like the feeling that I could drop in after a two-month absence and not feel like I've been left behind.

Opening Ahn'Qiraj in WoW, Feb. 2006. Working together? Who does that anymore?

Those of us in the roughly 25 to 35 age group are the "MMORPG generation."

Perhaps that's the real problem: people like me -- the people who parted with gobs of money and time for the chance to establish real relationships, communities, and rivalries in a digital fantasy world -- are getting old. Those of us in the roughly 25 to 35 age group are the "MMORPG generation" raised on Ultima Online, EverQuest, and yes, early WoW. While we still love to play, we simply have no time for that kind of devotion anymore. Frustrated with the hours demanded by Star Wars: The Old Republic's long dungeons and lack of a group finder two months ago (and the resulting deadline conflicts), I found myself thinking that controversial casual-minded features such as group finders, short dungeons, and quick rewards are less aimed at younger players than toward us -- the former hardcore crowd who now juggles gameplay time with families and careers. Blizzard's recent campaign to specifically win back players who've quit only confirms this. It's sad, in a way, like Las Vegas concerts with graying disco stars that try to cash in on an older generation's memories of yesteryear.

The Tyranny of Variety

Since we also live in an era gushing with multiplayer games of all types and a ridiculous range of free-to-play MMORPGs (mediocre though most may be), I can't see younger players ever latching on to single MMORPGs as we did and that lack of permanence proves disastrous for most communities. Again, the conditions just aren't the same. They might enjoy the leveling process to varying degrees, but the choices offered ensure that we usually can't count on meeting up with most of our friends in a single game like we used to. As such, even MMORPGs' ridiculed role as "action-packed chatrooms" no longer holds the same appeal, especially when common non-gaming distractions such as Twitter fulfill related roles.

Guild Wars 2: Okay, I've shot a member of the annoying race, I can log off satisfied now.

I still believe that if we ever arrive at Neal Stephenson's vision of an interactive "metaverse" as described in Snow Crash, we'll see it first in an massively multiplayer role-playing game. But any MMORPG that models itself on the games that enthralled us from 1996 to 2006 does itself and its players a disservice, no matter how many fond memories they bring back during our first few hours with them. Future MMOs need to focus on winning a constant stream of new players, not catering to what worked for devoted audiences in an age before smartphones, Facebook, and instant gratification at almost every level of digital society. The world has moved on, and if developers aren't careful, players will, too.

Spy Guy says:
Ah, I remember 2006! Britney Spears' meltdown, Superman Returns made us not care about Superman again, and Justin Timberlake brought Sexyback. Do you think there's any more life in the traditional MMORPG format, or should developers leave it alone for a few years until it's retro and cool again?